Fascinating new Malcolm Gladwell piece riffing off new biography of Goldman Sachs Wunderkind Sidney Weinberg, explores the advantages of being an underprivileged outsider. Excerpt:
We further assume that businesses based on social ties reward cultural insiders. That's one of the reasons we no longer think of poverty as being useful in the nineteenth-century sense; no matter how hard you work, or how disciplined you are, it is difficult to overcome the socially marginalizing effects of an impoverished background. In order to do the stock offering for Continental Can, you need to know the head of Continental Can, and in order to know the head of Continental Can it really helps to have been his classmate at Yale.But Weinberg wasn't Yale. He was P.S. 13. Nor did he try to pretend that he was an insider. He did the opposite. "You'll have to make that plainer," he would say. "I'm just a dumb, uneducated kid from Brooklyn." He bought a modest house in Scarsdale in the nineteen-twenties, and lived there the rest of his life. He took the subway. He may have worked closely with the White House, but this was the Roosevelt White House, in the nineteen-thirties, at a time when none of the Old Guard on Wall Street were New Dealers. Weinberg would talk about his public school as if it were Princeton, and as a joke he would buy up Phi Beta Kappa keys from pawnshops and hand them out to visitors like party favors. His savvy was such that Roosevelt wanted to make him Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and his grasp of the intricacies of Wall Street was so shrewd that his phone never stopped ringing. But as often as he could he reminded his peers that he was from the other side of the tracks.
At one board meeting, Ellis writes, "a long presentation was being made that was overloaded with dull, detailed statistics. Number after number was read off. When the droning presenter finally paused for breath, Weinberg jumped up, waving his papers in mock triumph, to call out 'Bingo!' " The immigrant's best strategy, in the famous adage, is to think Yiddish and dress British. Weinberg thought British and dressed Yiddish.
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I think the title Wunderkind says it all. Brilliant, talented people can overcome poverty and in some cases use their less-than-privileged background to their advantage. On the other hand, a mediocrity from Weinberg's neighborhood would have no chance of getting rich on Wall Street. A mediocrity from a privileged background has a chance.
Advantages of Privilege? President and Mediocrity in Chief George W. Bush. And an army of dissolute Kennedy's.
When I was a young guy, I shared a house in Princeton with another guy who worked at the university. He was an alum. Worked in development, i.e., fund raising. He told me that 20% of the Princeton freshman slots were legacy set asides. In other words, they wouldn't be admitted based on their credentials alone.
I'm not voting for Obama, but when people were yapping about Michele Obama's affirmative action admittances and clamoring to see her collegiate work so they could evaluate its quality, I wondered how come there's not the same kind of interest in legacy grads and their academic profiles.
Why aren't those dopes also stretched through the wringer?
Steve M @ 9:08 AM writes:
"I'm not voting for Obama, but when people were yapping about Michele Obama's affirmative action admittances and clamoring to see her collegiate work so they could evaluate its quality, I wondered how come there's not the same kind of interest in legacy grads and their academic profiles.
Why aren't those dopes also stretched through the wringer?"
Because, unlike our new-model Madame Defarge and her husband, they aren't running for President.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
On the other hand, a mediocrity from Weinberg's neighborhood would have no chance of getting rich on Wall Street. A mediocrity from a privileged background has a chance.
Indeed. That's why I say we scholarships aimed at the top of a class to the best universities are often a bit silly. The exceptional help themselves. The real divide in this country is between those of average intelligence.
If you are an 'average' middle class kid, when you graduate high school, you can take a few years to get schooling, be it a bachelors or just an associate degree. Or intern somewhere for a few years. Either way, you have an actual career.
It's not a glamorous doctor or lawyer career, it's a 'clerical work' or 'car repairman' career, but it is a career. It lets you have a house, it lets you possible move to your own business, it lets you support your own kids for a few years while they get a career.
The 'average' lower class, OTOH, end up going to work straight out of school, or even during school, or even dropping out of school. They don't have any ability to 'waste time' to start their career, and they end up flipping burgers for sixteen years. (Or, in fact, turning to a career of crime.)
The best thing we could do it help get rid of the class divide is to take a 'full ride' scholarship to Princeton and instead give them to two dozen different 'average' students and help them take associate degrees in air conditioning repair or small engine repair or something. An actual job skill.
I won't even mention where the average upper class ends up. I think we've all figured that out by ourselves.
50 million dead babies from abortion and you will vote for a man who would kill his own grandchild if his daughter got pregnant!! None of your thoughts and concerns matter if there isn't life.....if Obama makes it many of our freedoms will be lost.
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